Ongoing news reports regarding global surveillance programs, massive personal data breaches in corporate databases, and notorious examples of personal tragedies due to privacy violations have intensified societal demands for privacy-friendly systems. In response, current legislative and standardization processes worldwide aim to strengthen individual’s privacy by introducing legal and organizational frameworks that personal data collectors and processors must follow.

However, in practice, these initiatives alone are not enough to guarantee that organizations and software developers will be able to identify and adopt appropriate privacy engineering techniques in their daily practices. Even if so, it is difficult to systematically evaluate whether the systems they develop using such techniques comply with legal frameworks, provide necessary technical assurances, and fulfill users’ privacy requirements. It is evident that research is needed in developing techniques that can aid the translation of legal and normative concepts, as well as user expectations into systems requirements. Furthermore, methods that can support organizations and engineers in developing (socio-)technical systems that address these requirements is of increasing value to respond to the existing societal challenges associated with privacy.

In this context, privacy engineering research is emerging as an important topic. Engineers are increasingly expected to build and maintain privacy-preserving and data-protection compliant systems in different ICT domains such as health, energy, transportation, social computing, law enforcement, public services; based on different infrastructures such as cloud, grid, or mobile computing and architectures. While there is a consensus on the benefits of an engineering approach to privacy, concrete proposals for processes, models, methodologies, techniques and tools that support engineers and organizations in this endeavor are few and in need of immediate attention.

To cover this gap, the topics of the International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'15) focus on all the aspects surrounding privacy engineering, ranging from its theoretical foundations, engineering approaches, and support infrastructures, to its practical application in projects of different scale. Specifically, we are seeking the following kinds of papers: (1) technical solution papers that illustrate a novel formalism, method or other research finding with preliminary evaluation; (2) experience and practice papers that describe a case study, challenge or lessons learned from in a specific domain; (3) early evaluations of tools and other infrastructure that support engineering tasks in privacy requirements, design, implementation, testing, etc.; (4) interdisciplinary studies or critical reviews of existing privacy engineering concepts, methods and frameworks; or (5) vision papers that take a clear position informed by evidence based on a thorough literature review.

IWPE’15 welcomes papers that focus on novel solutions on the recent developments in the general area of privacy engineering. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:
-Integration of law and policy compliance into the development process
-Privacy impact assessment
-Privacy risk management models
-Privacy breach recovery methods
-Technical standards, heuristics and best practices for privacy engineering
-Privacy engineering in technical standards
-Privacy requirements elicitation and analysis methods
-User privacy and data protection requirements
-Management of privacy requirements with other system requirements
-Privacy requirements operationalization
-Privacy engineering strategies and design patterns
-Privacy architectures
-Privacy engineering and databases
-Privacy engineering in the context of interaction design and usability
-Privacy testing and evaluation methods
-Validation and verification of privacy requirements
-Engineering Privacy Enhancing Technologies
-Models and approaches for the verification of privacy properties
-Tools supporting privacy engineering
-Teaching and training privacy engineering
-Adaptations of privacy engineering into specific software development processes
-Pilots and real-world applications
-Privacy engineering and accountability
-Organizational, legal, political and economic aspects of privacy engineering

This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive; since IWPE'15 is interested in all aspects of privacy engineering. However, papers without a clear application to privacy engineering will be considered out of scope and may be rejected without full review.